Greetings from the sports desk located somewhere below the main deck of the Good Pirate Ship RedState. Sammy the Shark and Karl the Kraken, after ferocious complaints from soccer fans around the world about their disinterest in the World Cup, have finally gotten their fins and tentacles off the couch, vowing to conduct an in-depth, hands-on (or reasonable equivalent thereof) investigation of the sport…
At least their hearts are in the right place.
For the most part, there are two types of sports fans in the world: those who would crawl from Bodega Bay to Baltimore on bare hands and knees across scorching and broken asphalt to watch a soccer game—any soccer game—and those who would greatly prefer the alternative activity of watching root beer go flat. I fall somewhere in between in that I do watch soccer when I have a rooting interest (go Earthquakes and Roots!). Still, given the choice between what the rest of the world calls football and the Big Four of American sports, i.e., baseball, football (the real one, be it American or Australian), basketball, and hockey, soccer takes a back seat.
Much has been made of some of soccer’s more, shall we say, peculiar rules to which it stubbornly clings in the face of logic, reason, and trying to make the sport make sense. For one, there is the clock. A soccer game, or match, consists of two 45-minute halves which are never 45 minutes. Instead, extra time is tacked on at the end of each half based on the referee’s best guess as to how many minutes were spent minus action. That would be actual action, as opposed to the time both teams spend doing nothing discernible in an attempt to score; if that were the case, some games would last a minimum of three weeks. No, this is when there is no action due to causes such as waiting for whichever player has decided that an opposing player touching him with all the brute force of a butterfly sneeze warrants collapsing on the turf with such drama and agony that LeBron James would tell them to stop flopping finally gets back on their feet. And when is this extra time announced? When the half would have otherwise ended. And when does this extra time itself end? Whenever the referee feels like it. So why not, oh, stop the clock when there’s a stoppage in play, as is the case with every other sport that uses a clock? Same reason the clock counts up instead of down, I guess. Apparently, when some English gentlemen formulated the rules of soccer in the 19th century, the only game clock available was Big Ben.
Then there is the offside rule. Should you feel the need to give yourself a splitting headache, you can read the whole rule. This is an excerpt:
A player is in an offside position if:
* any part of the head, body or feet is in the opponents’ half (excluding the halfway line) and
* any part of the head, body or feet is nearer to the opponents’ goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent
While having the rule in place makes sense, in that otherwise every team would spend the entirety of every game trying to kick a long pass to their best scorer positioned directly in front of the other team’s goal, it does lead to a lot of frustration when an apparent goal is waved off due to someone being a molecule of shoe polish ahead of the second-last opponent. Said individual (second-last opponent) is more commonly known as the guy that the guy with the ball just blew past on his way to taking a shot. To try and alleviate the possibility of human error in such situations, VAR (Video Assistant Referee—what, you thought it would be something logical like Video Assisted Review? This is SOCCER we’re talking about!) comes into play. VAR consists of an off-field referee who carefully reviews video footage to ensure that he or she makes as equally boneheaded a call as the on-field referee. Why they don’t have sideline monitors for the on-field referee to review video footage and determine whether the initial call was correct is a matter of conjecture. Probably that strenuous avoidance of making sense thing.
Anyway, the 2026 World Cup is almost done. France and England will meet today (Friday, July 17, 2026) for the dubious honor of finishing third. One suspects the game will closely resemble this sneak preview:
Mbappe and Kane playing for a 3rd place for the sake of it. pic.twitter.com/8GHlvHbCP2
— Miss Tomboy 💋 (@Mbilu_Yanga) July 16, 2026
On Sunday, July 19, 2026, Spain and Argentina will meet for the championship. Spain probably has the better team, but Argentina has Lionel Messi, who is that rare athlete transcending his sport into the realm of pure athletic greatness. Much like Wayne Gretzky did in his prime, Messi makes things happen that ought not to happen. Yet there they are.
Clear angle of Messi assist
— Yakub (@Yakkubkk) July 16, 2026
Wow, this assist deserves to be in a museum pic.twitter.com/IS0QlE9nIo
Enjoy the weekend, everyone.
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